Originally from Montgomery, Alabama, and now ensconced in the Big Easy, Grave Ritual rapidly made a name for themselves, first with their 2009 demo and then even more dramatically with their 2010 debut album Euphoric Hymns From the Altar of Death. They proved their ability to inject remarkably vitality into a classic style of primal old-school death metal that many might have thought had run its course.

It has been a long wait for the band’s next album, but it’s now nearly upon us, coming down like a black, ravenous raptor and set to spread its claws on October 30 via Dark Descent Records. Bearing the title Morbid Throne and emblazoned with cover art by the mighty Daniel Desecrator, we predict it’s going to be welcomed with open arms despite the punishment it’s going to inflict.

One song from the album (“Adversary Crown”) made its brutal debut last month, and today we bring you a second one: “Tyrant’s Hammer“.

The song pounds with merciless ferocity, just as you might expect from its title, and from every pore it oozes the stench of decay and doom. Moving between scathing assaults of unhinged savagery, head-smashing chugging, and gruesome death/doom crawls, the song is a dynamic piece of depravity.

And it’s also as heavy as a ten-ton mallet to the skull, with more than enough grit and grime in the sound to raise images of corpses rising from their graves but enough clarity in the production that you don’t feel like you’ve fallen into a bubbling vat of mud as you listen. And while the song is vibrating your teeth with its distorted power, cracking skulls with its booming grooves, and raising goosebumps with the horror of the inhuman vocals, it also manages to be damned infectious.

Morbid Throne will be released by Dark Descent on October 30 and it’s available for pre-order at the Bandcamp page linked below. In case you missed “Adversary Crown” when it premiered at Decibel, you can check it out right after you get smashed by “Tyrant’s Hammer”.

As my tastes started to change, that was the first underground label that clicked with me as well…I used to constantly go through their new release section checking out bands I didnt know. Still one of my favorite labels